Our first repeat author. There is a lot of O'Neill on this list. Shakespeare turns up the most, and I am pretty sure Dickens is second, but O'Neill may be the third most represented author in this program.
I knew almost nothing about this play going into the reading. It seems to have been relegated to the national literary attic for most of the past forty years or so, probably until people can figure out how to pull it out and handle it safely. It is about racial division, and really is a pretty daring and pretty strong take on the subject for the mainstream theater in 1924. O'Neill obviously was a white male, and perhaps no one is interested anymore in what he would have had to say about the American racial situation, but I am interested in it, especially since it is a significant departure from the way most other white guy American writers of the time (i.e. Booth Tarkington, F Scott Fitzgerald, even T S Eliot) seemed to regard it. O'Neill was immersed pretty seriously in the cultural and artistic life of this period, and he must have felt that the race issue impacted him in some way and that he had something to say about it. <I only wish I were so impacted and engaged in life>.
The 1960s introduction to the play in the IWE is truly a missive from a foreign country. Fifty years on, it defies contemporary intellectual propriety in about every way, though its intentions are clearly good and liberal in the context of its own time. I will reproduce it in its entirety:
This is a penetrating study of a controversial subject. A white girl, Ella, marries a Negro man, Jim, and she loses her mental balance. It is a foreseeable consequence in psychology and is not subject to controversy. On the message of the play, however, the United States divides on sectional lines. Generations of Northern students have been taught that the play is a protest against our culture, in its implanting of ineradicable prejudices. Southerners rather see in it a warning against the natural perils of miscegenation; and of course the warning is there, protest or no. The title is from a Negro spiritual.
The famous actor Paul Robeson was the original Jim on the stage.
I am a northern student (as was O'Neill himself, at one time), so I suppose it is natural that I am inclined to assume that the first interpretation is closer to the intention of the author than that it is a warning against miscegenation.
The sets and stage directions in this, particularly in the first act, have a bold, modernist character about them that strikes one. The first three scenes of the first act are set on 'a corner in lower New York' where two streets converge, with intervals of some years between them. Tenements stretch away down each of the streets, one of which is populated exclusively by white people, the other exclusively by black people. Popular songs of the various eras depicted are heard--different ones on each of the streets--and as the years progess the streets are emptier and the noises 'more rhythmically mechanical, electricity having taken the place of horse and steam'. The fourth scene, in some ways the central and most jolting one in the play, takes place 'in front of an old brick church...people--men, women, children--pour from the two tenements (on each side of the yard), whites from the tenement to the left, blacks from the one to the right. They hurry to form into two racial lines on each side of the gate, rigid and unyielding, staring across at each other with bitter hostile eyes'. In truth I admit that if somebody--whether an angry female (whether of color or not), a pouty, sarcastic gay, or maybe even a straight white guy who suspiciously managed to stay in everyone's good graces--were to write something like this into a contemporary play, I might not trust the accuracy of the vision or find the same level of attraction to it that I have done here. Age also has a way of clarifying what in at attitude or vision is solid or deep and what wasn't that I have a hard time delineating in the present.
From a British production.
I also can't repeat enough how much I love the American language and literary consciousness of the 1920s and 30s. Every time I come back to this period it really hits me. Unfortunately I am very much in many of my habits and worldviews stuck in this period and cannot relate very well to people who are alive now and the things they care about.
The second act, with its scenes in the apartment, struck me as very reminiscent, in its mood, setting, and sense of frustrated male hopelessness, of A Raisin in the Sun. In a broad sense, of course.
Oona (1925-1991), Eugene O'Neill's extremely attractive daughter, who at age eighteen married Charlie Chaplin, who was fifty-four at the time, and went on to have eight children with him. The playwright did not approve of the marriage, after which his relationship with his daughter was severed.
The Challenge
1. Sam Harris--Waking Up......................................550
2. Daniel E. Dennett--Consciousness Explained.....144
3. Dan Smith--The Child Thief................................110
4. Julie Cross--Whatever Life Throws at You............71
5. Eva Stachniak--Empress of the Night....................68
6. Ezra Pound--Cantos...............................................39
7. Leann Harris--Second Chance Ranch......................8
The winner this time is subtitled A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion, which is something I might read, though the concept is not one that obsesses me. However, my local library does not have a copy of it, and I am not inclined to seek it out. There were some promising contestants this time, though. The Dennett book I think is supposed to be for an intelligence level above the general level, and the Ezra Pound, though finishing weakly in 6th place, was the result of a small alteration I have made in the process to try to get more serious books into the contest. I am betting the next Challenge gives us something we can actually read.
Paul Robeson sings the title song. It's a very good song. Obviously no one needs my pronouncement on the matter, but as a person who I am sure most knowing people would agree has and knows nothing of soul or anything in that way, the fact that I still like the song might be of interest to people who are in the same boat.
O'Neill referenced a number of old songs, some of which I was familiar with, some of which I was not (but all of which I want and think I should be) into the stage directions. There was "Only a Bird in a Gilded Cage":
"Little Annie Rooney", here in one of the better efforts of the Lennon Sisters:
I think this is the third time I have read this; I wonder if it probably will be the last. The first time was in October of 2004, and I thought it very good. The second time, a small report of which I made on my other blog in 2009, I thought much less of it, probably because on that occasion I was reading it alongside other Cleopatra plays, Shakespeare especially, but also Shaw and even Samuel Daniel, to which I thought it compared unfavorably. My judgment on this third reading is somewhere in between those of the previous two. The verse struck me once more as admirable and worthy of respect in itself; and as I was not as immersed in the story and particular set of characters over multiple versions as I had been on the second occasion, the manner in which they happened to be depicted here was not as off-putting to me. I am sure that none of these plays/novels/movies written 1500+ years after the events that inspired them are particularly accurate in terms either of history or characterization; however Dryden's characterization struck me as the weakest and least probable of the set when read alongside the others. However as I said, It did not bother me much on this occasion, and indeed I scarcely noticed it.
There is a picture on the page I linked to of my then 5, now 11 year old son holding up my Modern Library copy of Twelve Famous Plays of the Restoration and Eighteenth Century. My other book list loves Restoration drama, so I have read eight of the twelve famous plays for that, and numerous others from the period besides. At least five of the twelve are also on the IWE list and there may be as many as seven--I am not certain off hand whether Goldsmith and Congreve made it or not--so it has proven to be a volume worth having.
I have come over the years to enjoy Restoration plays when it chances that I have to read them, as I have come, I must admit, to enjoy sampling from most of the major genres and periods in literary history. I am not a very fierce reader, particularly with regard to the authors of the past, the value of whose surviving work, at least in the better examples, always seems to me to outweigh their deficiencies. The Restoration was not, I will say, one of the literary eras that I took to right from the start; as a teenager especially, I could make nothing out of it at all. Over a period of years and reading many plays and poems and other books from and about the period I have attained enough familiarity with it that it has acquired an interest for me as something definite and fairly important, and I even have a little fondness for it as a distinct entity in the family, or college, of literary history, people I look forward to seeing at a party every once in a while, especially here at holiday-time. That said, my feeling in reading them is still different from that I have in reading certain other genres to which I am perhaps closer in spirit. Reading long passages of formal verse especially requires some degree of alertness and concentration, and does an admirable job of keeping fuzzier emotions at bay.
I thought this was the only Dryden play to make the IWE list, but I see that The Conquest of Granada has also made it, so we aren't quite done with him yet. Like most modern people, I do not respond to Dryden overly strongly (as you see, I am having difficulty in writing about him)--indeed, it is hard to tell whether anyone has really done so, even in his own time. He was the poet laureate and the leading playwright and public critic and literary man of his age, but even then he doesn't seem to have had a lot of rabid disciples or imitators. He was very good in the technical aspects of writing. His sentences and verses have a kind of neat quality about them as far as being constructions of words and sounds meant to convey thought. Like a lot of writers of his general class, I suppose he ultimately lacks power in the high degree. But to my mind he and his period are still worth knowing in some degree.
TheChallenge
I've decided to keep the Challenge as it has been for a little while, take it up if anything interesting should chance to win, and if not, then keep moving along the main list.
1. Jack Campbell--The Last Fleet: Guardian..........................................241
2. Vicki Alvear Shecter--Cleopatra's Moon..............................................56
3. Jacob Abbott--Cleopatra.......................................................................39
H. Rider Haggard--Cleopatra................................................................39
5. Si Sheppard--Actium 31 B.C.: Downfall of Antony and Cleopatra.........6
I don't remember what this time's winner is about--I think it's a modern sci-fi/fantasy type thing, of limited literary interest. My library doesn't even have it. So I will move right on to the next book on the list.
Four of the next five works on the IWE list are plays, along with one short novel. So I should continue to make a rapid progression through it for a while longer.
Alison's House won the Pulitzer Prize for drama in 1930. Even though its author is a woman, writing in an era when women were supposed to be underrepresented among playwrights, and its namesake subject a genius female poet who has some similarities to Emily Dickinson, it has fallen into obscurity. It has been out of print for years, there are very few copies of it available on the internet, and most of those are over $100. As I want to collect at least some edition of all the books on this list--and most are either available very cheaply or I have them already--I was hard put to find anything available for under $50, let alone 15, which is at the outer edge of what I usually consider resonable. I finally came across a volume of Six Plays published in London in 1930, which looked to be a compendium of that year's major dramas on both sides of the Atlantic--in addition to Alison's House, it also included Marc Connelly's Green Pastures, which is also on the IWE list, as well as something by Elmer Rice (Street Scene)*--for eight bucks, though unfortunately as it had to be sent from New Zealand the shipping and handling was an additional twelve. But I was able to get my book, and not suffer an interruption in the program.
As I think this play is not widely known, I will briefly recapitulate its story, setting, and character. It is set on December 31, 1899, which everyone in the play considers to be the last day of the 19th century, and that there is significance in the fact. Alison, the titular poetess, has actually already been dead for twenty years, but her elderly sister has continued to live in the family house they shared, which is substantial and cultivated, and is situated along the Mississippi river in Iowa (Glaspell was a native of Davenport, Iowa, presumably the unidentified nearby city where Alison's brother, a lawyer, and his children live). They are not the Vanderbilts as far as wealth goes, but all of the men in the family either are attending or seem to have attended Harvard, which in 1899 indicates a pretty rarified status, especially in Iowa. As the elderly sister is becoming too infirm to live by herself in the old house anymore, the family has decided to sell it off and bring auntie to live with them in town. As the transfer is to take place the next day, the first day of the 1900s, they are spending the new century's eve cleaning the old place out. In addition to Alison's brother and sister, there are the brother's three children: the frustrated, dutiful older son and his even more rigidly correct wife, whom he does not love; the younger son, who is verge of flunking out of Harvard and is trying to save his skin by getting some gossip about his famous but mysterious dead aunt to feed his voracious English professor; and the wayward daughter who ran off with the husband of one of her friends and had been in effect banished from the family before turning up on the occasion of the house closing. There is also a reporter from a Chicago newspaper who has gotten wind of the house being sold and is sniffing around for a possible story, and the attorney's 'secretary', whose mother was the woman he really loved and whom it is strongly hinted is really his daughter. While there was a literary group interested in buying the house and preserving it as a museum, it appears as if the house is going to be sold to some vulgar townspeople who plan to turn it into a summer tourist resort. This all unfolds very compactly and neatly in the course of the play, which has an excellent construction. In reading it has a considerable amount of atmosphere also, with the imminent change of century and departure from the house and the sense that a comfortable familiar is about to be gone. It is also of course written in the language and style of its time, which has a cleanness and honesty and--awareness (?) of the essential details of its world, and their significance--that I do not find to my satisfaction in own writing at least, and not much in that of contemporary writers.
So as a means of amusing myself and escaping into the past I rather liked this, and again congratulated myself on finally allowing myself to take up this antiquated, and heavily middlebrow (though with a lot of real literature on it) list, which really does give me a pleasure that my life had come to lack through my years of unsuccessfully striving to become someone other people would approve as intelligent. If you were to ask me "How good is it?" and "What are its insights?" and insist on my defending such positions as I took, I would say 1) It is overall quite good, it is the work of an intelligent person, it evokes mood and feeling, pays tasteful homage to a period, a class of characters, and a somewhat iconic personage in our history without being overbearing about it; and 2) That is more difficult. However, the theme of elusive love, or loving an inappropriate person and being unable to find a love that is more acceptable, is a dominant one in the play, effecting at least five of the characters, including Alison, and seems to have been the wellspring of her celebrated poems. We are also reminded of the inevitability of death, not only of individuals but of generations, and cultures, etc, but with the suggestion at least of continual rejuvenation and the possibility of art to transcend the strictures of normal human time. So there is that. The play is not an absolute joke intellectually, at least not to people in the 85th-95th percentile range of intelligence or so. This group could get something out of the exercise of reading it.
It happens that I recently (late October) saw another play that was explicitly about Emily Dickinson, The Belle of Amherst, a one woman show writtenby William Luce, first produced in 1976. I went to this because my sister-in-law was the actress. The play was staged in a circa 1903 stone library that has been converted into a kind of community function hall. It was great to be out and to see a live performance with that degree of intimacy. The material was engaging, and the effect was probably greatly aided by seeing this particular story in New England the week before Halloween, which is an especially New England-y (in the Emily Dickinson sense) week. I don't know if it would be the same seeing it in Miami, which is where my sister-in-law currently works. It was really good to get out of the house, and they even had a little wine and cheese reception afterwards. You may laugh, but I never get to go to things like this. I almost felt like a real adult.
The Bourgeois Surrender Challenge
The challenge is dying. Another lackluster selection of titles and another murder/detective novel as a winner. Who reads all these detective novels? I know some of them are literature but the vast majority of them are exactly alike. The detective is always supposed to be some kind of superior super-intellect with a deep understanding of men and the organization of society, yet the books are always stupendously boring. I am going to have to revamp the system again to try to produce results more in line with what I am looking for.
1. The Beautiful Mystery--Louise Penny.......................................................................................1,111
2. Chance of a Ghost--E. J. Copperman...........................................................................................62
3. With Our Eyes Wide Open: Poems of the New American Century (ed. Douglas Valentine)............2
4. Lost Libraries: The Destruction of Great Book Collections Since Antiquity (ed. James Raven).....1 The FSG Book of 20th Century Italian Poetry...............................................................................1
6. Cambridge Companion to 20th Century English Poetry (ed. Neil Corcoran).................................0 Earth-Moon--Ted Hughes.................................................................................................................0
*The remaining plays in this collection are Badger's Green by R.C. Sherriff, Down Our Street by Ernest George, and the intriguing sounding Socrates by Clifford Bax.
"Her brown hair is parted in the middle, and held loosely at the neck. She is looking straight ahead, as if into something. But she is really waiting for the right word to come. They came, you can tell that. They were willing visitors. She didn't have to go out and pull them in. There is a knock at the door. It's me. I am crying. She makes a funny little face. She says, 'Tell Alison.' I tell her Jimmy Miles has knocked over my mud house. She says, 'You can build a fort, and put him in it.' She tells me the story of the bumble-bee that got drunk on larkspur and set out to see how drunk you could get in heaven. And what became of her thoughts--the thought I interrupted?"
The Annontated Alice gave a list of all the Alice film and TV adaptations. It didn't seem to love any of them, including the 1951 Disney version (though there was a 1936 Mickey Mouse cartoon based on the Alice books that was described as "brilliant"). The one that was referenced the most was a 1933 Paramount production, which looks somewhat interesting, at least, and it had a lot of big names in the cast--W.C. Fields as Humpty Dumpty, Cary Grant as the Mock Turtle, Gary Cooper as the White Night. Alice was played by Charlotte Henry, whose career did not really go anywhere after the break of getting this role. I have not seen this movie apart from these short clips on You Tube.
I found the Mickey Mouse cartoon. I'm not a cartoon expert, and it's 2:30am, but it seems pretty good.
When I first read these through again--I am pretty sure I read them as a teenager at some point, or at least the first book, as I found I did not recall most of the incidents in Through the Looking-Glass--I admit that my initial impression was that they were not as spectacularly brilliant as their reputation would have them be, or even as the sense I had of them in my own memory. From my vantage point as a 44 year old in the year 2014, the story and incidents, while not uncharming, felt too insubstantial, and not epic enough, and that the jokes, heavy as they are on puns and nonsense, were not making me chortle as much as I wanted them to. I wondered whether this sense I had of the book's smallness and datedness was a phenomenon of our current age, especially the enormity of confident and dismissive intellectual life one is exposed to on the internet, where even trivial exchanges offer challenges and demand a level of demonstrable intelligence and worldly competence that even the Alice books as they lay on the page do not, on a surface reading, quite seem to stack up to (though Lew Carroll himself in the discourse and activity that is recorded of him certainly comes off as quick and mentally adroit enough to have made his way somehow in the current social marketplace of intellectual talent).
So, as with almost all of these old books, I had to remove myself psychically from my contemporary mode, in which I don't have much identifiable being anyway, and slip back into an approximation of my onetime self, circa age 25, which to some extent still lies dormant under the modern '-grade', whether up or not I am not willing to commit to an opinion on, much as (I am told), some of the older computer systems at my work are still buried under the programs that we have to use currently. The Alice books, I reminded myself, belong to literary culture and the world of reading in almost every way that I used to hold dear when I thought these things would be at the center of my life. The characters and stories are so well known as to be a shorthand, a part of the language of this pastime of literary study, usually in a way intended to express a variety of delight. It brings into this often morose community welcome exposure to a lively and enthusiastic element of intelligent people with whom I at least otherwise rarely come into contact in my pursuits. In spite of their frequent morbidity, the books are spurred by the author's strange but often captivating passions along with of course a unique and highly interesting talent and intelligence. Still, I had to slow down and allow the experience and the words and the aspects of life that are being emphasized to be absorbed over several days before I could begin to feel a genuine appreciation for the story once again.
After I read the books through in my own lovely copy, with the Tenniel illustrations (MacMillan Children's Classics, 1937), that I bought at a library sale in Pennsylvania in 1986, I took the Annotated Alice by Martin Gardner ('one of the great intellects produced in this country in this century', according to Douglas Hofstadter, who is apparently someone I am supposed to know) out of the library, partly to see what sort of things I had missed, partly to prolong the experience of the book, which one reads through pretty quickly; even though I am at the very beginning of a list of books that I will be lucky to get through before the end of my life, and in theory should welcome any volume I can dust off in a day or two, I really do like to spend some time with them before moving on to the next one, hence movies, notes, blog postings, etc, etc. The annotations I find here to be helpful in providing a clearer sense of the social and intellectual atmosphere and ruling spirit out of which the book arose, which is what I find most interesting about it. I am still not sure how the recurrence of the number 42 enhances the meaning or the greatness of the story, but I do find it of interest that it was a number so especially favored by the author that he felt it desirable to interpose it into the story as often as he could. I liked the information that the drawling-master who was a conger eel was a reference to Ruskin, who gave weekly drawing lessons to the young Alice Liddell (and supposedly did look like a conger eel) and was also an admirer of her, making himself a rival of sorts with Carroll for the child's treasured affections. I like Ruskin's writings, which I have written about quite a bit on my other blog, but he is also the sort one likes to see made fun of a little by other smart people. It was also noted that while Ruskin made numerous references to Alice Liddell in his diaries and so on, his Oxford colleague Carroll was conspicuously never named. As to Alice Liddell, who was evidently about as captivating a young person who has ever existed, as a teenager she had a 'romance', whatever that entailed in 1870, with Prince Leopold, Queen Victoria's son, while he was a student at Oxford. In that time of course it was impossible that the prince should marry anyone other than a princess (though surely Alice Liddell's blood and other endowments were more than vital enough to enhance any royal line, especially the decrepit ones of the late nineteenth century). The prince did name a daughter of his Alice shortly after the other Alice's own wedding had taken place. So there is some good stuff in there.
I find the first book, Alice's Adventures, to be much the superior of the two. Of course I have just begun the annotations to Looking Glass, so maybe my feeling on this will change. However, I do think the first book is warmer, has better and more natural characters and a more interesting progress, and is funnier. The real Alice was twenty by the time the second book came out, and it has in places much of the feeling of trying to recover or grasp hold of something that was lost or in the process of being lost, which gives it a lot of poignancy, but does not have the same sense of immediacy and fun as the first book. My favorite character is the queen of hearts. She reminds me of my wife. The Mad Hatter is probably my second favorite. I like this verse also:
"In my youth', said his father, 'I took to the law,
And argued each case with my wife;
And the muscular strength, which it gave to my jaw
Has lasted the rest of my life."
Do you think she dresses up and acts out scenes from The Magic Mountain?
I was listening to a radio program in the car the other day on which the energetic self-help guru Tony Robbins was briefly a guest. As someone completely devoid of personal dynamism, who has had to live with the consequences of that, I have always thought it might be a nice gesture of the gods if I could be reincarnated, on Earth or in Elysium, with a Tony Robbins-like personality, even if only for a short period, a single human-length year or two. My wife, who has more of the New England skepticism about people who exude positivity, would likely argue that something is off about Robbins, that his persona cannot be real, that no one who acts like him is truly a happy and well-adjusted person and that he is massively overcompensating for some emptiness or perceived deficiency in his life. I find his ability to compensate so effectively to be compelling, though I do not believe, as many people seem to, that I could will myself to be as habitually gregarious as Tony Robbins is all the time if I really wanted to.
My object in introducing Robbins here is that the interviewer asked him at one point if he had observed, among the many high end performers he had worked with over the years, including presidents, billionaires, superstar athletes and entertainment figures, any common quality that set them so far apart even from the mass of ordinary successful people, to which Robbins replied "hunger". This is certainly widely believed and promoted as true, and perhaps it is always so at the extreme right end of the achievement tail, which is what we all should be aiming for, after all. Literature however has an unusually large (number) of notables who are not at that extreme tail, and who do not give off an air of being consumed by Tony Robbins's idea of hunger to any great degree, who nonetheless hold a place of some honor therein. Carroll strikes me as a man of this class. The happiest day of his life, which he kept coming back to for the remaining 35 years of it and which provided the inspiration for producing the two works for which he is remembered, was passed in gliding along a river--I presume it was the Thames--in a rowboat with a group of little girls. This does not sound like a man burning with a relentless ambition to dominate anything, yet he was still able to achieve significant things. Maybe this could not be repeated today however, certainly beneath a very high social level (though Carroll certainly belonged, comparative to the mass of the populace of his time, to a pretty exalted station, though he was not considered well-born by most of the people with whom he associated).
It does not need to be said, but the Tenniel illustrations are a great gift to the world, or at least its students of literature, and never fail to provide me with some delight in the possibilities, however rarely realized in my own self, of existence.
The Challenge
After a very paltry challenge last time out, we were able to attract a huge field for this installment, though almost exclusively of obscure books, most of little interest to me, as well as devoid of much in the way of signs of merit. I wonder if the Google apparatus (I do not flatter myself by saying people) has figured out my game and is feeding me reams of junk for its own amusement. Look at this mess:
1. The Nesting Place--Myquillen Smith............................................................329
2. Barbarians at the Gate: The Fall of RJR Nabisco--Burrough & Helyar......189
Volumes receiving a score of 0: Samovski Zabovnik by Dragoslav Andric, Book of the Hastings International Masters Chess Tournament 1922, The Crime Club by W. Holt White, Dilemmas by A. E. W. Mason (the 2nd time this little known book has appeared in the challenge), The Pig Brother by Laura E. Richards, The Mediterrenean by Bonney, Ball, Traill, etc, Blood of the Zombies by Ian Livingston, Clara in Blunderland by Caroline Lewis, 1,000 Mythological Characters Briefly Described by Edward S. Ellis, and Humorous Readings and Recitations, by the Albion Reciters.
The winner is a frilly, frothy book about home decorating. I think I will pass again.
There was an unusually crowded and competitive Film Challenge this time, featuring an extremely close finish and a major upset over the heavily favored entrant that had not only the home post advantage going for it but the backing and imprimatur of the all-powerful Walt Disney Corporation:
1. Dawn of the Dead (1979)......................................742
2. Alice in Wonderland (1951)..................................732
So after immersing myself in the world of Alice and some of the innumerable exegeses devoted to it for a further week, my belief in its greatness and brilliance (and humility at my own littleness) is almost fully restored. It is not one of the books that is uniquely mine, and that I love intimately, and it never will be, because of limitations on my own part, but it gives me some happiness to reunite with it at intervals of years, to see as much as I can that it holds up as well as I remember it and exchange a jest or good-natured greeting with it, to affirm that some positive connection exists between us. This is what reading mainly is for me now.
This is another book that really carries us back into the lost past, in more than one sense in my case. Even to read the first page is to be suddenly dropped, in a manner reminiscent of Mr Rogers's television show, away from everything relevant to current life into the ever vanishing world that was our country in the early years of the 20th century. There is urbanization, there is industrialization and pollution, there is big business, or at least localized variations of it, there are even automobiles and trolleys. However we have not come yet to radios, air conditioning, movies (in this book at least), widespread high school completion, and a host of modern psychological refinements, with regard at least to people who actually aspire to respectability, in areas such as race, self-awareness and presentation, and socio-economic expectations and entitlement. It is also a world where Booth Tarkington is one of the most popular and acclaimed novelists in the country, considered wise and a cultural leader by many, the winner of two of the first four Pulitzer Prizes awarded, one of which was for this book, Alice, as everyone will know now, was published the year before the appearance of Ulysses and The Waste Land, and the year after Fitzgerald had heralded the arrival of the Lost Generation writers with his wildly succesful debut, compared to all of which people and work Tarkington's writings and concerns, as well as those of his readers, almost at once appeared hopelessly quaint and out of date by anybody with any literary sensibility, and his reputation gradually declined, though he remained a name that was accorded some respect among the second rank of authors and readers, which level was still of a fairly high quality, and does not really have a parallel, certainly in terms of mass, among the reading public in our day, up to the 50s. Here is the original cover for Alice Adams, which is set contemporaneously (one of the characters at least mentions that he was recently out of service after the war, though his war experience plays no role in his character, nor the war itself in the character of the book), The design is not exactly looking forward towards modernism or any other movement afoot and about to burst out all over in the 1920s, but evokes a kind of middle American charm and nostalgia for what was understood even at the time to be neither charming nor anything worth being nostalgic for. Even thinking in terms of 1921 I am sure that the image gives the sense of looking at the present through a frame or eyes that have not fundamentally adjusted their way of perceiving for twenty or thirty years past, even if there are late model cars and storefronts pencilled into the scene. But I am all right with that, which I guess really is a problem with me.
I read this many years ago (this is the other incidence of return to a lost past), when I first attempted to go through this list as a teenager and was drawing the titles out of a plastic bowl to determine what to read next. At the time I thought it quite good. It is a simple book, very easy to understand, yet the descriptions of scenes and the feelings of the characters are good enough that it feels like you are reading something intelligent and worthwhile, especially I suppose when you are a teenager. This time around I was a little more attuned to its shortcomings, both in the writing and overall conception and execution, though there were still some things I liked about it. In the first part of the book I enjoyed the full immersion in the world of the 1910s which really does not reach out to you across the ages but lies as if buried in a chest, or on the dark shelves of a library storage area, requiring you to come to it, though in the second half the relentlessness of the social failure and humiliation with which this pitiful family is afflicted becomes rather painful even for the reader to endure, and I found myself dreading approaching scenes in which the various disasters that the Adams's attempts to hold themselves a little higher than they ought to have dared must inevitably play out. Are people really that bad? I guess they would be, if any of us aspired to break into society that was as far above us as the people Alice wants to hang out with are above her. I was also taken much more aback on this reading by the general crudeness of the thoughts and speech and manners and mindsets of the society depicted in the book. It does not feel as if the author is exaggerating or straining to write in an affected way to make a point, as someone like Mark Twain might be inclined to do; the dialogue and the thoughts have a simplicity and naturalness about them that give a sense that this is what it was really like much of the time. It is not that people are not crude in this way now, of course, but most of them are not really trying to be respectable in the way that Alice and her parents are. People of this type would go to college and be exposed to such media now as would smooth down their rawness and unrefinement to something a little less obvious. The book is extremely racist, in a casual and largely incidental way--that is, it is not about black people at all, but when they appear or are alluded to in passing the attitude taken is always contemptuous--which I had even noted as a teenager. Alice Adams's ne'er do well brother is known to hang out at jazz joints and shoot dice with the black kitchen workers in the back of the establishment. In a modern book set in this time he would undoubtedly take on the persona of a cool and sympathetic character who 'gets' something (perhaps it), but it is pretty obvious that Tarkington intends to demonstrate by this that he is thoroughly disreputable. By means of comparison, a lot of people say that, for example, Faulkner is racist. He probably is by most current standards, but even if it is so his racism is worlds more sophisticated than Tarkington's. Faulkner's black characters, or at least numerous of them, have qualities, and strengths and individual histories and personalities, as well as personal deficiencies that are their own and not necessarily relevant to other black people. All of this was absent in Tarkington. Things like civil rights and integration were not big themes in the Faulkner books I have read, though I sense that part of the message of his 30s books is that in southern society black and white are more intimately and subtly intertwined than people commonly acknowledged. At the same time he was one of those authors who tried to apply an exacting and unflinching eye to things, and he seemed to find the circumstance that blacks were oppressed and legally and socially inferior without being able to do much about it or at that time offer any kind of threat--and not even necessarily of a violent quality--to the status quo to be telling, and something of an indictment, against the community designated as black. I am assuming it is in this aspect that the accusations of Faulkner's racism and the insistence that he cannot be considered a great writer if this is the extent of his belief and understanding of the matter come from. But it is still a considerable leap forward from Tarkington's attitude.
But getting back to Alice Adams, I wanted to touch on some of the things about it that I liked. Here is a passage where Mr Adams is lying in bed at dawn after a largely sleepless night that makes me feel I am right there in the room in 1920:
"He heard the milk-wagon drive into the cross-street beneath his windows and stop at each house. The milkman carried his jars round to the 'back porch,' while the horse moved slowly ahead to the gate of the next customer and waited there...His complaint was of the horse, who casually shifted weight with a clink of steel shoes on the worn brick pavement of the street, and then heartily shook himself in his harness, perhaps to dislodge a fly far ahead of its season. Light had just filmed the windows; and with that the first sparrow woke, chirped instantly, and roused neighbours in the trees of the small yard, including a loud-voiced robin. Vociferations began irregularly, but were soon unanimous...Night sounds were becoming day sounds; the far away hooting of freight-engines seemed brisker than an hour ago in the dark."
There was another passage which was of some of Alice's thought processes which I meant to mark down at the time as pretty good but I cannot find it now.
The Adams family does not seem to have any kind of intellectual life, in the sense that they don't read at all, other than perhaps local newspapers, nor do they do anything with music. They were not well enough off to send their children to college, which they looked at however as more of a desirable social marker than an opportunity for exciting scholarship. Their mental energies are entirely focused on money, business, and social status. Again this is not in itself unusual, but the circumstance that it is presented so matter-of-factly is unusual. The absence of books in the activity of the family is not even pointed out by the writer, it is something I noticed myself. I feel like most writers either would not be able to write about such characters at all or would feel compelled to do so as if they were oddities or otherwise alien. Tarkington does write about them as if they are normal people that anyone might know or would write a novel about. This feels like something of an achievement because writers are too overeducated to do it now.
I had forgotten about the at the time well-regarded 1935 movie based on the book that was directed by George Stevens and starred a young and surprisingly cute Katharine Hepburn as Alice and that old dog Fred MacMurray as Arthur Stevens, the handsome young man from a good family. The clips from it on the internet are fairly enticing, though the Adams's house certainly looks a lot nicer in the movie than I had imagined it in the book. Katharine Hepburn does kind of look like what I imagined Alice to be.
There was also a 1923 silent movie. I don't know whether this is still extant as a whole, but there are stills from it floating around on the internet.
If I had more time to spend on these--I think it is very interesting how the forms that people with social insecurities take change over time, you know the particular things that bother them or the characteristics that they have, The Honeymooners is another example of this. There are not really a lot of guys in form like Ralph Kramden nowadays, that particular loud blowhard type who is obnoxious and not very successful but nonetheless occupies a definite social niche. Yet I feel that this personality was more common in his generation. That type of thing...
The Challenge
Almost an un-challenge. I thought this would be an interesting one too. The magic words for Alice Adams however were so generic that in combination their searches turned up hardly any titles at all:
1. The Iron Queen--Julie Kagawa.................................331
2. The Hate Factory--W.G. Stowe..................................39
Of all of the classes of books that at one time or another have been considered to belong to the realm of Literature, those volumes constituted primarily of tales of a fantastic nature would appear to have suffered the steepest decline in esteem by contemporary readers. This seems almost counterintuitive, given the current immense popularity of modern stories featuring fantasy and magic among all ages and classes of readers; it is evident however that the writing ,and the mindsets of the protagonists and the problems to be overcome in the new stories, despite their superficial resemblances to the older stories featuring knights and ladies and enchantments, have been updated to appeal to modern sensibilities such that they possess a vividness to the present generation of readers that the romantic stories of Scott and Boccaccio and their ilk do not.
Washington Irving's Alhambra is primarily a book of legends and tales of this romantic sort--that is what it is remembered for, to the extent that it is remembered--though it also partakes of the genres of travelogue and I suppose some light history. I found it a wonderful book, at this particular time of my life anyway, found Washington Irving, whom I had never read before, to be a much more interesting writer than his current stature suggested to me he would be, and found my already fervent (for me) desire to go wandering around Spain re-confirmed and further whetted by the perhaps unrealistically romantic but unabashedly good-natured affection with which the author (infects) his account. The IWE introduction states, with characteristic candor, that the book is a "typical work of North America's first man of letters--good writing but seldom superlative." I suppose this is accurate, but I do want to note that I was struck, more than I usually am, perhaps because the writing was 'seldom superlative' by what a good command Irving had of the language. It is a vigorous kind of writing, always clear and precise in spite of some 19th century tendencies towards effusiveness and hyperbole, and also frequently humorous. I will give a couple of examples from "The Legend of the Moor's Legacy":
""Honest Peregil thus saw himself unexpectedly saddled with an infidel guest, but he was too humane to refuse a night's shelter to a fellow-being in so forlorn a plight."
"Now it so happened that this Alcalde was one of the most overbearing, and at the same time one of the most griping and corrupt curmudgeons in all Granada. It could not be denied, however, that he set a high value upon justice, for he sold it at its weight in gold."
"As ill-luck would have it, there lived opposite to the water-carrier a barber named Pedrillo Pedrugo, one of the most prying, tattling, and mischief-making of his gossip tribe. He was a weasel-faced, spider-legged varlet, supple and insinuating; the famous barber of Seville could not surpass him for universal knowledge of the affairs of others."
My edition is from 1926. It belongs to the 'Academy Classics for Junior High Schools' series, pocket-sized little volumes with nice thick paper, a large number of photographs of the Alhambra and various sites associated with Washington Irving, and about fifty of footnotes, biography, study questions and other supplemental information. The footnotes and appendices of course are unabashedly Eurocentric. (Some favorite footnotes: Allah: God; plains of Tours: Near Tours, in France, in 732, Charles Martel defeated the Mohammedans and thereby saved Europe; Henry III: King of Castile, 1390-1406. He was called "The Weak," because he was by no means inclined to wage war against the Moors.") The editors in their comments about the Moors betray attitudes and thought processes that will properly draw frowns from unignorant moderns, though they are trying, after their paternalistic fashion, to be complimentary:
"(The) Moors, he (Irving) learned, were Caucasians like himself, with the fine strong features of the white race, and of a handsome, dignified, noble appearance. Since they had descended from generations of people who had lived in the hot sun of the desert regions, they had dark-brown complexion, dark eyes, and intensely black hair...They established colleges; encouraged literature, art, and science; the development of mathematics and of medicine, of astronomy and physics, as well as the study of history and geography; and they did wonderful work in the making of silken cloth and of steel. In many ways these dark-faced people benefited Spain, setting slaves free; relieving the oppressed; reducing taxation, and giving wide freedom. They did so much that was remarkable that they thought of themselves as leaders of men, and made all people respect their culture and their intellectual ability."
Irving's own comments on the Moors, it should be noted, had somewhat less of this overt racial condescension. As even the editors of this edition discerned, "Irving wrote about the Moors with enthusiasm because he thought them a great people.":
"As conquerors, their heroism was only equalled by their moderation; and in both, for a time, they excelled the nations with whom they contended."
"The Arab invasion and conquest brought a higher civilization, and a nobler style of thinking, into Gothic Spain. The Arabs were a quick-witted, sagacious, proud-spirited, and poetic people, and were imbued with oriental science and literature."
Washington Irving seems to have led all in all a pretty swell life. Certainly that is the impression given in the biographical sketch of him in my 1926 schoolboy edition, which would have left out all references to the sorts of petty unpleasantnesses with which any life is filled and which tend I think to be overemphasized in modern biography. It did mention that Irving was engaged to be married when he was twenty-six, and that his fiancee died before the wedding. It does not seem that he ever married anyone else, and of course there were no allusions to any kind of illicit romances in the schoolboy book (Wikipedia says that when he was forty, and already long a successful author, he proposed to an eighteen year old who turned him down; it also asserts that Mary Shelley, who was 14 years younger than Irving herself, expressed, through a third party, romantic interest in him, but Irving did not pursue the relationship). He was born in New York in 1783, a great time and place to have done so, certainly by the standards of history up to that point, and acknowledging the favorable circumstances of race, gender, social position, etc that he possessed. For the free Americans my impression, which seems to be corroborated by statistics with regard to things like average height, birth and death rates, etc, those first decades of nationhood after the revolution were a pretty heady time to grow up, full of confidence and purpose, again by comparison to almost any other time and place in history. By his 20s Irving had become the first person in the history of his nation to be recognized primarily as a litterateur in the European tradition. He lived in and traveled all over Europe for seventeen years, including his three month sojourn inside the Alhambra. After the success of that book, he was awarded the post of United States Ambassador to Spain by president Tyler, though he seems to have accepted the post reluctantly. He lived out his middle and old age in his beautiful mansion (which can still be visited, by the way) along the Hudson, reading, writing more books, meandering around the Catskills and heading down to the City when the mood struck him. He died in 1859, just in time to miss the next great national cataclysm, fittingly it seems to me, as he belongs so thoroughly to the epoch of our history that was exploded when the Civil War happened, though perhaps he would have been interested to see it. Really, his life was kind of my ideal, apart from his never having married or any children (which I have to assume he could have afforded and paid/directed someone else to take care of while he wrote and traveled.)
The making of books had attained a very high level by the 1920s. This copy I have is in excellent condition, sturdy, has great paper, no typos or other printing errors, easily readable print, is attractively designed. It's great.
The Bourgeois Surrender Challenge
I read the winner from the last challenge, Bel Canto by Ann Patchett, which came out in 2001, and seems to have been pretty well acclaimed. I suppose it has some qualities of professional literary authorship about it, but overall it doesn't quite achieve anything that that status would suggest. First of all, the book is only 318 pages, but it seems like it goes on forever, which is not a great sign. Secondly, while she does not affect it, the author seeps with a kind of bourgeois snobbery that is not yet wholly earned enough to be tolerable in artistic pursuits. Her characters are too much what she imagines people of their distinction and achievement must be like, and not enough what she knows of the same. I assume Roxane Cox, the opera singing diva from Chicago who possesses an understanding of and intimacy with the higher things of life that are beyond that of almost everyone who has ever lived, is supposed, even if subconsciously, to be a stand-in for our author, which is a identification that the author has not earned, and does not earn by way of a convincing demonstration of the character. The book is most interesting perhaps as a window into the ego of the modern American woman. Roxane Cox, whom I take to be the author's alter ego, is an American from a middle class midwestern Catholic school who somehow has developed into the world's greatest opera singer. She is flown in at exorbitant expense to an unidentified godforsaken country in South America to sing for the CEO of one of the most important corporations in Japan because he loves opera, she is his favorite singer, and the government of the godforsaken country is desperate for him to build a factory or otherwise invest some dough there. During the concert terrorists, expecting the president of the country to be there, burst into the palace and take the assembled international crowd of extremely rich, cultured and important guests hostage. After a couple of days all of the women and unimportant men are allowed to leave, except somehow Roxane is not set free. She is thus the lone woman imprisoned in the among forty or so mostly alpha men, none of whom it should be noted, are Americans--they wouldn't be interesting enough. All of the men fall in love with her, especially after she begins to sing for them all every day. She picks the one she wants out of the bunch, the great Japanese CEO as it turns out, to be her lover during the captivity under the terrorists (don't ask), and the other men--even the Russians!--tamely accept this decision. Of course we are all entitled to our personal fantasy worlds, but at least recognize them when they are delineated so blatantly.
Anyway, onto this week's challenge. I thought with all of the Spanish and Alhambra material producing the magic words that we would have an interesting and high octane contest, but it turned out to be nothing of the sort.
1. Civilization: The West and the Rest--Niall Ferguson.....................................................226
2. Sister Queens--Julia Fox.................................................................................................135
3. Le Freak: An Upside Down History of Family, Disco & Destiny-- Nile Rodgers.........113
4. Enchantments--Kathryn Harrison.....................................................................................99
5. Codex Magica--Texe Marrs..............................................................................................83
6. At Hidden Falls--Barbara Freethy.....................................................................................40
7. The Damascus Cover--Howard Kaplan............................................................................26
8. The Economist Style Guide.................................................................................................7
9. Advanced Language Practice With Key--Michael Vince...................................................2
Lot of zero-scorers this time, mainly among older books: The Dementia of Iyan Igma; A.J. Calvert, Southern Spain (This was actually listed among the recommended supplemental reading in my copy of the Alhambra); Mary F. Nixon-Roulet, Our Little Spanish Cousin; Eyewitness Travel: New York City 2011; Joan Ouellet, The Captive Dove; Happy Days For Boys & Girls; and W.A. Leahy, The Incendiary.
I am glad that the Niall Ferguson book was the winner, because that is the sort of popular non-fiction book that I like to read and have not always taken the time to fit in. Ferguson is, or was a few years ago at least, on the way becoming the new Christopher Hitchens/Andrew Sullivan British expat political and economic commentator for that portion of the educated set that is especially blown away by Oxbridge polish and erudition. I have started his book, and it is entertaining and has some interesting information in it, particularly about medieval era China, though Ferguson is the type of writer who is very emphatic that he is giving us the truth and the assertions of previous authors and sometimes even positions that were widely held among the most prominent scholars in a field for decades were completely off the mark. This kind of thing leads me to suspect that he is oversimplifying the ideas and thought processes that prevailed formerly. However, as I said, I am still enjoying the book.
The Alhambra words produced a very weird movie challenge:
1. Silver Streak......................196
2. Body by Bethenny..............177
3. God's Pocket........................20
Yes, the winner is the 1976 Gene Wilder/Richard Pryor collaboration, and the close runner up is the exercise tape of a divorced reality television personality who is about my age, and unfortunately seems to be a pretty typical specimen of the kinds of women I had to spend my adolescence unsuccessfully trying to figure out how to gain the approval of because they seemed to be the predominant type that was around.
